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Drayton Valley Museum hopes to identify early residents

Aug 15, 2018 | 11:42 AM

They are photographs of men standing amongst timber, high school graduates smiling, school children lined up in a neat row for a class photo — and all of them are unidentified Drayton Valley residents. 

The Drayton Valley Museum is trying to change that, taking on a mammoth challenge of identifying nearly 100 early settlers amongst hundreds of photographs taken between 1908 to 1970. 

“We have the photos in our collection, and we keep finding more photos and we want to document the history of Drayton Valley as best we can so we need to know who’s in these photos, who was here at the time,” said Curator Kristan Schamuhn. 

Schamuhn, along with volunteers at the museum, have been trying to identify people as well as buildings photographed for five years now, however she admits that with each passing year knowledge may be slipping away. 

“We are always on a race against the clock here, it’s a race to get those memories, those stories and that history down,” she says.

It’s a wide collection of photographs, with many being school class photos from the 1930s and 40s. Wedding photos along with people posing on the street or at work are scattered amongst the pile as well. 

“If we can identify these people, we can pinpoint who was here at that time and that’s a part of our history that we want to remember, we want to remember the families, the heritage,” says Schamuhn.

It’s not just people the museum is trying to identify, it’s places and buildings as well.

Approximately a dozen people have been identified over the years, whether through cross referencing with multiple photos or having a family member come in and spot an ancestor snapped long ago.

“One woman came in with a binder full of photos, and we in fact had a photo of her grandmother from the 1920s and she had never seen that photo before. She had actually been unidentified in it,” Schamuhn concludes.

She hopes that anyone that has deep family roots in the area will come on in and check out what is in the museum’s collection, and help paint the picture of the early days of Drayton Valley.